Obama Aide Says Perry, Romney Not Mainstream

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is going after Mitt Romney and Rick Perry for supporting ideas outside the mainstream of American political thought. In a memo to be released Monday, the campaign attacks the two GOP front-runners for their positions on Social Security and immigration, The Washington Post’s political blog The Fix reports.

“The campaign to win the Republican nomination has become a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the tea party,” Ben LaBolt, press secretary for Obama’s re-election effort, writes according to the Post. “They would return to policies that have been tried before and done nothing to improve economic security for the middle class, rewarding special interests who can afford to pay for lobbyists instead of looking out for working families.”

The strategy is to cast Massachusetts’ former governor and Texas’ current governor “as extremists, having adopted positions on key issues outside of the mainstream of American thought,” the Post wrote.

The memo notes that Perry has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme . . . and continues to question its constitutionality” while Romney “supports turning Social Security funds over to Wall Street.”

On immigration, LaBolt’s memo also says that while a Gallup survey showing 64 percent of Americans support a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, the leading Republican candidates oppose it, putting the Republican field at odds with the public, the Post reported.

President Barack Obama s re-election campaign is going after Mitt Romney and Rick Perry for supporting ideas outside the mainstream of American political thought. In a memo to be released Monday, the campaign attacks the two GOP front-runners for their positions on Social...